My wife and I have the exact same birthday. So every year around this time I start looking for free stuff for our birthdays. Last year was perfect, because Disneyland was giving free admission on your birthday, so my wife and I gladly got to go to Disneyland together, both for free =D. This year although Disneyland isn’t free on birthdays anymore, there are still a lot of places that offer free stuff on birthdays! This day is becoming the day my wife and I go around and get free stuff! Here are some that I’ve used:

Finally, I’m back at the first hit when you google “isaac liu”. Because of all the webhost changing and redesigning of my page, my page rank started dropping, until eventually my site completely disappeared from google search when querying “isaac liu”! I did some researching and found out that by using the < meta refresh = "" > tag to do redirection, my page rank took a penalty, and maybe even prevented the google crawler to index my site. This is because normal spam sites use this method to redirect people to their spam sites. Thus, I went out to find how to do redirection the correct way, which was using 301 permanent move. What that means is, the http code that’s sent back to the requesting client should be 301, which means “permanently moved site.” The < meta refresh="" > method sends back the code 200, which means “Request OK,” and then later does the redirection. That is extremely not search engine friendly. To change this required tweaking of the .htaccess file on my web host, which is using the UC Berkeley EECS department’s webhost. If your curious, i added the following code to my .htaccess file:

This uses the Apache mod_rewrite engine to rewrite all incoming requests to index.html (line 2 and 3) to the “site” subdirectory. Now all requests will be forwarded and the header message sent back will be 301 (specified by R=301 ), which is search engine friendly. Low and behold, I am back atop the google search for “isaac liu”! If you are using < meta refresh="" > to do redirection, and don’t know why your page isn’t showing up on google, this might be the reason! A more indepth tutorial on mod_rewrite can be found here.

We just got a new puppy! The picture shows me holding our new baby while our elder one Bigby, the cat, is being introduced to him. Layton is a Labador Terrier mix. He’s only 3 months old and was just rescued from Taiwan this weekend! He was about to be sent to a foster home before we picked him up. We named him Layton after Professor Layton from Nintendo DS. Hopefully you’re as smart as him Layton!

Webby turned out to be very addicting… It’s certainly as powerful as I imagined, with lots of room to play with. However, I haven’t used ruby in a while, so it’s time to remember the syntax of ruby. I also learned to use partials in my layout, so i can further separate content and layout. This is progressing along fairly nicely…

I have just setup the main frame of the site, and added a little personal touch to it so at least people know who’s site this is. There is still plenty of work to be done, but I’ll take it one step at a time, and slowly migrate all the content from my previous site here. But I think this is enough to deploy.

I’m also trying to be more efficient when I’m deploying the site, so I’m trying out git + webby. I am going to keep all my source code and output folder in github, then just do a repository clone on the server. To update I just need to pull updates from github on my server, and it’s done! So far so good.

Is there a scalable way to create websites with only static pages? I don’t want to continuously be adding html pages, or editing html pages…

The answer is Yes! I’ve began experimenting with static web site generators (currently using Webby), and my new site will be the results of this experimentation. I hope for the following when I’m experimenting with Webby:

Separation of content and layout

To use newer markup languages (textile, markdown, haml … )

All static pages when website is deployed

Easy to add content (or else i never will…), preferably a blog like structure

It seems Webby has it all. So it’s time to dive in and see what I can do with it!

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About the Site

This site was created using webby, which is a dynamic generator for static websites. The purpose of this site was for me to experiment with website generators, ruby, lightweight markup languages (textile, Haml, Markdown etc). I wanted to generate a blog like website where it was easy to update contents, it had content and layout separation, and it’s only static html pages. Then i plan to integrate more dynamic features with javascript slowly. The source code of my experiment (this website) will be kept public and up to date on github. By doing so, i can also easily deploy this website (since it’s static and the pages are all in a source control repository) to any webhost. Feel free download the source to play with it and contact me if you have any questions or comments.